One of the most thoughtful analyses of how the American system can remain predicated on the noblest of values while allowing the vilest of crimes was offered in 1971 by a brilliant and earnest young foreign-service officer who had just resigned from the National Security Council to protest the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia.

For suppose that A is predicated of F, and that the intermediates-call them BB’B” ... - are infinite, then clearly you might descend from and find one term predicated of another ad infinitum, since you have an infinity of terms between you and F; and equally, if you ascend from F, there are infinite terms between you and A.

Thus, while the episode operates as a scene of instruction for the eponymous protagonist, the particular and necessarily stable sense of things on which Knightley’s instructions are predicated, is ultimately insufficient in dispelling a “social density that is unsortable, unexplainable, and [...] unanswerable to any discursive formation.”

In fact, the emergence of Affluent Activism, which the forecasting company FutureLabs describes as a predicated on the rise of "conscience consumers who are cash-rich, credit-using urbanites who ... use credit cards as ballot cards," is here to stay, even as affluence declines.